XI, C, 4 
Copeland: Natural Selection 
169 
tion was paid to the possible disappearance of species in a place 
where we had the advantage of possessing notes and herbaria 
prepared in previous decades, the conclusion was reached that 
five species, none of which had ever been other than strictly 
local in those towns (by local, I mean confined to single small 
areas, as single hill-sides or bogs), had been exterminated so 
far as these towns were concerned. The conclusion reached 
was : 
It is a most instructive lesson in the survival of what exists that above 
thirteen-fourteenths of the native habitat has been altogether changed in 
character, and the other one-fourteenth decidedly modified, without the 
extinction of a single common forest herb, shrub, or tree. 
The chief factor modifying conditions in Ceylon is surely 
agriculture. With its advance, the existence of the species 
restricted to such land as is demanded for agriculture must at 
least be jeopardized. It is hardly possible that there are not 
during each decade some species lowered in the scale of common- 
ness by clearing and cultivation. The most conspicuous victims 
of the advance of agriculture are those trees that grow on land 
of agricultural value. The dominant forest trees of this kind 
of land throughout the far eastern tropics are the dipterocarps. 
I have already shown one reason for the rarity of the species 
of Doona and Stemonoporus. It seems to me hardly doubtful 
that the development of agriculture in Ceylon has materially 
decreased the commonness of these and the species of other 
dipterocarp genera, and that the existence of some of these trees 
in the near future will depend upon their deliberate protection 
by men. Among the peculiarities of the flora of Java, the most 
outstanding single peculiarity, as compared with that of Borneo,- 
Sumatra, Banca, the Malay Peninsula, or the Philippines, is the 
limited number of dipterocarps. While seventy-five are known 
in the Malay Peninsula, and more than one hundred from Borneo, 
while scantily explored Sumatra has yielded more than thirty, 
and the Philippines at least seventy-five, Java, botanically better 
known than any other of these regions, possesses only twelve 
known species outside of cultivation. 
The unquestionable explanation of this extreme scarcity of 
dipterocarps lies in the use for agriculture of the part of Java 
suited to dipterocarp forest. It may be that they were never 
as numerous in Java as in Borneo or even in Sumatra ; but that 
Java contained less species than Banca is incredible. Is it to be 
supposed that the factors which have cut the dipterocarp species 
of Java to twelve, while leaving Java with a flora vastly richer 
